[TUTORIAL] Installing Windows NT 3.51 in Virtual PC 2007

[ppgrainbow]

Windows NT 3.51 has installation and data corruption problems when installing it under Virtual PC 2007 with more than one processor core installed. This is a follow-up to a previous post that I made on April 20, 2014 and I have decided to post a good tutorial on how to install Windows NT 3.51 under Virtual PC 2007. This applies to users who are still using Virtual PC when using Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.x as host machines and for Virtual PC 2004 when running Windows 2000 and Windows XP as host machines.

1. Start Virtual PC 2007.

2. Using Process Explorer, look for the process that says "VirtualPC.exe" (or equivalent) and set process affinity to use 0. Process Explorer can be downloaded here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

3. Create a Virtual Machine using the New Virtual Machine Wizard and with the recommended settings (a 2 GB VHD with 64 MB of RAM). Windows NT 3.51 does not support hard disks larger than 4 GB on install.

4. Install Windows NT 3.51 as usual using installation diskettes and the Windows NT 3.51 ISO.

5. You will need to use ImDisk to edit the VHD disk image, apply the Windows NT 3.51 Post-SP5 SuperPack: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/

I also recommend to using the IMDisk ToolKit to better manage the hard disk image: https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/files/20200727/

6. Install Windows NT 3.51 install Service Pack 5. The file that you can search on Google is SP5_351I.EXE (1996-09-19) for Intel x86 processors: http://cd.textfiles.com/cica/cica9710/PATCHES/

7. Shutdown the VM, close Virtual PC 2007 and install the Windows NT 3.51 Post-SP5 SuperPack here: https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/winnt351.htm#4

I recommend placing the SP5_351I.EXE and the SuperPack file on the root directory of the hard disk image.

8. When you're done, you can start Virtual PC 2007 again without the use of setting the process affinity to 0.

9. If you need to change the drive letter for a Windows NT 3.51 installation, go to Disk Administrator found in the Administrator Tools group.

10. From the Tools menu, choose Drive Letter and in the Assign Drive Letter box, select a drive letter other than C, commit the changes and reboot. This is useful if you want to move the Windows NT 3.51 installation onto a logical drive.

11. If you have MS-DOS 5.0 or later installed, place the BOOT.INI file, NTBOOTDD.SYS and NTDETECT.COM on the primary partition of the C drive and leave NTLDR on the drive other than C where Windows NT 3.51 is installed. Please refer to Chapter 16: Disk Administrator starting on page 428 for more information on how to use this feature.

I must apologise if my tutorial is not 100% perfect, but if you got any questions regarding how to install Windows NT 3.51 under Virtual PC 2007, please let me know.

Edited August 22, 2020 by ppgrainbow